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Source: Discovery News
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Source: Discovery News
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By Ben Collins via The Daily Beast
Trolls told Chris Hurst that his grief over losing his girlfriend in the Roanoke murders was a lie. But I've known him for years. Maybe, I thought, I could get them to listen.
Chris Hurst spent the last two weeks trying not to cry on television while telling the world how beautiful his life with his girlfriend was before she was murdered for no reason. Chris was the boyfriend of Alison Parker, who was shot and killed on live television in August by a mentally ill man who had an invented grudge and easy access to firearms.
Chris is a friend from college. Chris and I hosted a radio show together.
Or, according to millions of conspiracy theorists online, Chris Hurst is a part of my imagination.
In the minds—and YouTube videos—of some conspiracy theorists, Chris is not a news anchor at WDBJ in Virginia. Chris, the videos say, is a "crisis actor" invented less than a month ago by the United States government as part of a false flag operation that will eventually allow the New World Order to take away every American citizen's guns and force them into a life of subjugation and tyranny.
Every day now, Chris wakes up to find strangers' hate on his Facebook wall that he has to personally delete. Or he'll Google Alison to find the people he has to thank for donating to her scholarships and he'll see, instead, another conspiracy theory YouTube video, viewed 800,000 times over, that says Alison was in on it all along, and that she's been given a new life and maybe plastic surgery by the government.
"It happened again about an hour ago," Chris says. "It's hard for me to manage that because I hit land mines when I do. They have all these details I don't want to know.
The most recent one says Alison was dating someone else and that she and Chris were never together at all. That person is really Alison's ex-boyfriend, who conspiracists found by looking through her old Facebook photos.
Two weeks after he lost the love of his life in the most gruesome and devastating way imaginable, this is what he has to sit through when he turns on his computer each morning.
"The hoax theories have taken a toll for sure," he says. "I've definitely felt it more than anyone. I'm the one with the Facebook and Twitter page."
It is simply easier for some people to believe that the United States government has concocted a vast conspiracy to take away all of our guns than it is to believe that it is too easy for a mentally ill person to acquire one and shoot anyone they want.
And now those same people are taking it out on the families of the victims of gun violence after a tragedy.
The last decade has seen a boon for "crisis actor" conspiracies on the Web and—along with them—a new set of psychologists and philosophers are trying to understand how people get dragged so far away from reality.
By Anthony Sharwood via news.com.au
IMAGINE, for a moment that the awful terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were in fact a conspiracy. That they were an inside job.
Imagine that the Twin Towers were detonated rather than just fell. Imagine that the Twin Towers had been deliberately wired up for destruction and collapsed from the top down, even though buildings wired for demolition always collapse from the bottom.
Now imagine the legions of people who would've had to spend months, completely undetected, concealing tonnes of explosives in the two towers to generate enough explosive force to take down both buildings. Imagine those people performing this sinister covert work despite the security and sniffer dogs which had been permanently stationed on site ever since the Trade Center truck bombing in 1993.
Keep imagining. Imagine that the plane which struck the Pentagon was, as some claim, a missile. Overlook the fact that a hijacked civilian aircraft, which was clearly visible on the radar at the Pentagon, completely disappeared off the radar right at the moment the Pentagon was impacted by the 'missile'.
Imagine these and many other incredible acts of stealth and coincidence. And now consider this. That no American, in 14 years, has ever come forward to admit it. That not a single one of the tens of thousands of people required to orchestrate the greatest attack on American soil has ever felt guilty about it, or been moved to speak for any reason.
Consider that not one of these people, not one, ever felt moved to spill the beans because they were broke and thought they could make money with a book or movie deal.
Ask yourself whether you truly believe that so many Americans would be evil enough, compliant enough, covert enough and efficient enough to pull an operation like this off without detection.
Or is it more likely, perhaps, that a small group of 19 men, trained and led by a well-funded international terrorist organisation, were better placed to organise the operation undetected.
Ask yourself that question, and then ask yourself this.
Did a man widely considered to be the least intelligent US president of all time really have the capacity to organise this? And if so, why? Plenty of previous US presidents had mobilised the military in the Middle East and beyond without murdering 2,973 of their own citizens.
Why concoct such a fiendishly intricate plot? To what end?
These are the questions conspiracy theorists won't answer. Because they can't. Because no one can.
Via YouTube
Most Conspiracy Theories are stupid. By the power of the internet they spread like wildfire and often poison discussions. But there is hope – we developed a way to debunk conspiracies in just a few seconds…
David Cameron was right to identify antisemitism as a step towards extremism. But how to tackle it remains a major challenge
By David Baddiel via The Guardian
But for the conspiracy theorists . . .
By Kyle Jahner via armytimes.com
Jade Helm 15, the multi-state, two-month U.S. Army Special Operations Command training exercise, began today, but the conspiracy theories surrounding it have collectively become a story unto themselves — with wild theories to include FEMA death domes and ice-cream-truck morgues.
The Army calls Jade Helm a standard training operation for unconventional warfare. But some have "connected the dots," and the military's true motives remain unstated: to either engage in an occupation or at least prepare for war within the U.S.
Whether you have concerns about Jade Helm or simply find the theories and ensuing furor and paranoia entertaining, below are the most striking theories. Meanwhile, skeptoid.com has a primer for anyone looking for more benign explanations to the alleged evidence of nefarious plotting — for those unworried about being labeled "sheeple" by conspiracy theorists.
FEMA Death Domes:
Some have alleged that new dome-shaped facilities are being built by FEMA for the purpose of detaining insurrectionists. While the Associated Press has written about the shelters, Jade Helm conspiracy theorists have latched onto FEMA Death Domes. Though purportedly hurricane and storm shelters that can protect a large number of people (and in cases provide community facilities like gymnasiums), conspiracy theorists argue that walls designed to withstand hurricanes and tornados make great prisons, and have linked them to Jade Helm.
Blue Bell Ice Cream trucks:
If you are going to start a war, you need a place to put the bodies, right? Some conspiracy theorists believe Blue Bell Ice Cream trucks could serve as mobile morgues. While none of the conspirators at Blue Bell balked at the idea and publicized the plot, sleuths found evidence: film of about a dozen Blue Bell trucks traveling on the same highway as a military convoy, apparently I-25 in Colorado.
Blue Bell closed it's Denver-area distribution center near I-25 in May, the same month as the video was posted. Fort Carson sits about 75 miles down I-25 from Denver. The company has said the convoy convergence was a coincidence. Blue Bell has been reeling from a recall and production shut-down following discovery of listeria monocytogenes in its ice cream. Multiple deaths in recent years have been linked to the outbreak. Still, a conspiracy-minded site called the company's first-ever recall suspicious and the trucks' proximity to a military convoy "creepy" while also linking the company to the Bush family and defense contracts, but admitted it couldn't verify whether the trucks were preparing to be mobile morgues or merely transporting food or just the trucks themselves from a closing facility.
Walmart: Always Low Prices … on bases for martial law:
The world's largest retailer has become an essential element to any Jade Helm conspiracy site. A handful of Walmarts — two in Texas and one each in Florida, California and Oklahoma — suddenly closed in April for six months, with the company saying they needed to make plumbing repairs. There are actually two groups with conspiracy theories, which note that city officials in the cities said Walmart wasn't filing for permits for repairs, according to a Florida ABC affiliate. One group expressing doubt is organized labor: some of the closings were allegedly punitive and retaliatory measures against workers agitating for better wages and rights, something they've been convicted of doing in Canada.
But Jade Helm theorists remain unsatisfied with either explanation of the closing of five out of more than 4,000 U.S. stores. (In addition, they cite razor wire protecting the roof of an abandoned Walmart in Cincinnati, though some noted it is in a high crime area and that copper and HVAC equipment would be a target for thieves.) Jade Helm theorists say the military plans to enact martial law and use the stores as processing locations or possibly to control the food supply in poorer areas. A theory also involves China using the sites as command centers, as it allegedly tries to replace the dollar as the global currency with its own and disarm Americans during a hostile takeover of the nation.
Via YouTube
By Emily Willingham via Forbes
Jeff Bradstreet, who has been described as a "controversial autism researcher," has now become the center of conspiracy rumors after reports of his apparent suicide. His death is said to have followed on the heels of a raid by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of his Bradstreet Wellness Center in Buford, Georgia (update 27JUN2015: the Georgia Drugs and Narcotics Agency is reported to have aided in the raid). A fisherman found Bradstreet's body in a North Carolina river on Friday, June 19. Authorities in Rutherford County, North Carolina, state that he had a gunshot wound to the chest, "which appears to be self-inflicted," according to the local newspaper, the Gwinnett Daily Post. The Post also reports that
"By Wednesday night, some of Bradstreet's supporters were speculating that his death wasn't a suicide, but a conspiracy."
That speculation has spread like a virus through the community of people who are mourning the loss of a man whom they viewed as a courageous crusader against mainstream medicine and who believe, as Bradstreet argued, that the mercury in vaccines causes autism (the evidence emphatically indicates otherwise). According to his website, Bradstreet, whose own son is autistic, embraced a number of unproven or untested interventions for autism, including using stem cells in an overseas study he chronicles, and hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which the FDA cracked down on in 2013. He was known for his use of chelation therapy.
By Mason I. Bilderberg
June 11, 2015
Paranoid Conspiracy Theorists (PCTs) believe the Bilderberg group to be but a small part of a bigger worldwide conspiracy known as the New Word Order (NWO), a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda … conspiring to eventually rule the world by replacing sovereign nation-states with an all-powerful, authoritarian world government. (Source)
According to people like Alex Jones and his ilke, Bilderberg is a super top secret, cone of silence, mysterious and all-powerful group of elite, world event manipulators. Bilderberg is the world's puppeteers and we are their puppets.
Given the secrecy of these evil human-alien reptilian hybrid overlords, what would you say if i told you i have confirmed this year's Bilderberg conference is set to take place starting today (June 11, 2015) through June 14, 2015, in Telfs-Buchen, Austria with a total of around 140 participants from 22 countries?
You read correctly, right here in my little skeptical hands i am holding the official Bilderberg 2015 agenda, list of attendees and agenda! For example, i can tell you the Chairman is named Henri de Castrie and a few of the items on the agenda include:
So how did i come upon such dark secrets? How was this information leaked? Did i have to rendezvous with dangerous, shadowy figures in the middle of the night? Is my life at risk for telling you this information?
All i did was head over to the official Bilderberg website at bilderbergmeetings.org where you'll find the dates and agenda items (PDF) of this year's meetings and a list of 2015 attendees (PDF).
I put this out there because every year about this time Alex Jones and company love to use spooky words like "secretive" and "leaked" to scream sensational headlines like: Bilderberg 2015 Meeting Dates, Attendees and Agenda Leaked!!!!
Nothing secretive, nothing leaked.
I love deflating conspiratorial balloons.
Mason I. Bilderberg
By Stuff They Don't Want You to Know via YouTube
Who killed RFK? Originally found guilty for the murder of Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan has spent years in prison — but some people believe he was used as a scapegoat.
Via inquisitr
Conspiracy theory websites and blogs have intensified the mass hysteria-inducing message that global civilization will witness a major climate catastrophe September 22-28 — due to an asteroid impact event — heralding the end of the world.While conspiracy theorists are unanimous that a major climate disaster will occur in September, 2015, there are as many versions of the details of the anticipated global cataclysm as there are YouTube doomsday prophets announcing the bad news.
But the various versions of the end-of-the-world predictions by biblical end-time theorists appear to be converging on the idea that the impending climate catastrophe will not be the end-of-the-world literally, but a major catastrophe that will trigger the Rapture and the commencement of the prophetic 7-year Tribulation. The Tribulation will witness the emergence of the Illuminati-sponsored New World Order (NWO), the revelation of the Beast, and Pope Francis assuming the role of the "False Prophet" mentioned in The Book of Revelation.
Obama, according to conspiracy theorists, will play a relatively modest role in the Tribulation period as the predecessor of the Beast.
The exact date for the asteroid impact is often stated as September 24. The impact will be a signal to the ever-conspiring Illuminati to implement their socialist world government agenda. The upcoming Jade Helm military exercises are part of Illuminati preparation for the New World Order.
According to conspiracy theorists . . .
Does Agenda 21 want to save the world or take it over?
by Kevin Hoover via skeptoid
Read transcript below or listen here
"Agenda 21." Well it certainly sounds ominous. Someone has an agenda, and if this is the 21st, are there 20 others that we aren't in on? And just look at Agenda 21's goals – nothing short of a global shift in thinking that aims to put the way we live on planet Earth on a whole new footing. It does this by providing certain… plans guiding the actions of political leaders on every level, even in your neighborhood.
On its surface, Agenda 21's goals are hard to fault. It purports to provide a framework for stewarding the environment and bettering the human condition on an enduring basis, all while protecting liberty.
Agenda 21 repeatedly affirms "freedom, dignity and personally held values," emphasizing personal wealth, improving the health of women and children, protecting cultural and natural assets and keeping the world's economy stable into the future. That cryptic number 21 simply refers to the 21st century. What's not to like?
Well, with a name right out of a Robert Ludlum political thriller, Agenda 21 is also something of a conspiracy theory toolkit. It's backed by the dreaded United Nations, proposes wealth leveling with developing countries, an array of ambitious environmental goals and loads of other changes to traditional ways of doing things, all riding in on a raft of politically charged terminology.
The 300-page document uses the word "sustainable" 647 times and "environment" more than a thousand. The word "science," by the way, gets 64 mentions, including index entries.
The potential for rhetorical redefinition hasn't been overlooked by today's hyperpartisan political writers and politicos. As an unintended consequence of the document, critics have figuratively deforested Earth to create millions of books exposing Agenda 21's hidden agenda.
Does Agenda 21 forward the framework for a new era of international cooperation and perpetual prosperity for all, or is it really a sinister trick to take away our rights, abolish private property, squash our freedoms, destroy American sovereignty and usher the world into a dark age of dystopian eco-dictatorship?
By Debra Kelly via Listverse
The main goal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to, theoretically, keep us safe from all those nasty diseases that they have locked away in their labs, their clean rooms, and their biohazard vaults. But, people are people, and people are naturally suspicious of anyone with that many nasty tools at their disposal. This has led a some pretty wild theories about just what's going on behind the closed doors of the CDC.
The CDC is located in Atlanta, Georgia, and that didn't go unnoticed by people who had also seen what looked like a huge stockpile of coffins sitting in a field along Interstate 20, outside Madison, Georgia. Throw in proximity to the airport, and the rumor mill started turning.
According to the conspiracy theorists, the field was the site of coffins that the CDC was stockpiling in preparation for what they were calling a "high-casualty event." Most recently, that was the massive Ebola outbreak, when conspiracy theorists realized that not only were the coffins still there, but there was also a page on the CDC website dedicated to the handling and disposal of the bodies of people who had died from Ebola. The site absolutely does specify that special caskets were required for burial. (Originally, they were called "hermetically sealed caskets," a term that was replaced with "metal" caskets in a January 2015 update.)
There are a couple of huge problems with the whole theory. For one, the caskets are not actually caskets; they're burial vault liners, which are placed inside the grave in areas that are prone to ground conditions like flooding. The heavy liners keep soil from shifting and collapsing into a wooden casket. Also, the burial vaults don't belong to the CDC, FEMA, or any other government agency; they belong to the company that manufactures them, Vantage Products. The field in Georgia is just where they store them, and there's nothing fishy about it, as their manufacturing facilities are located nearby.
The idea that AIDS was a man-made virus unleashed on an unsuspecting population really got its start in an East German publication, allegedly sponsored by the KGB, called AIDS: USA Home-Made Evil. The 1986 work of two scientists, the pamphlet argued that the American government had used their Fort Detrick, Maryland, laboratory to combine a sheep virus with a human one to create AIDS.
The whole idea was taken a step further by Dr. William C. Douglass, who wrote AIDS: The End of Civilization and claimed that the German scientists were right, and the World Health Organization (WHO) and the CDC were responsible for the introduction of the virus into the human population. He claimed it wasn't hard because it was spread through pretty much any kind of casual contact that you could think of, including mosquitoes.
Strecker Group head Dr. Robert Strecker also jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon with some even more impressive theories. According to him, the CDC is actively spreading the AIDS virus, which is actually a hybrid between a cow virus and a human one, and there are six different types of AIDS viruses all engineered in what he vaguely suggested might be a partnership with the Communists. His theories, works, and poorly made amateur videos went on to inspire Dr. Alan Cantwell, who pointed the finger at the CDC for what he believed were clear political motivations for their active spread of AIDS.
According to Cantwell, the CDC is the instrument of a genocide targeting America's gay population. One of his fellow theorists goes, amazingly, a step further and suggests that this incredible attempt at genocide calls for nothing less than martial law and a revocation of civil liberties while the whole problem is sorted out.
The battle over whether parents should or shouldn't vaccinate their children is an ongoing one, and there's a pretty fascinating story on the conspiracy theorists' side. In 2005, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. published an article in Rolling Stone linking the big pharmaceutical chains with the government's tendency to hide potentially dangerous effects.
According to Kennedy, the CDC held a meeting at the Simpsonwood Conference Center, that he described using words and phrases like "isolated" and "complete secrecy." It was invitation-only, and only top officials from various parts of the government were invited—from the FDA, the WHO, and everyone from a who's-who list of drug companies. They were under strict orders not to discuss anything.
The whole meeting allegedly had to do with findings released by a CDC epidemiologist that linked mercury-based vaccines with a high rate of autism and other developmental problems like delays in speech and hyperactivity. According to the data, vaccines were responsible for raising the instances of autism to one in 166 cases—up from the normal one in 2,500.
The rest of the conference, Kennedy says, was spent discussing how to cover everything up. He says that the transcripts of the super-top-secret meeting (which he acquired through the Freedom of Information Act) detail the damage control mode that all the representatives went into. Data was reworked, and the CDC was more than happy to lend a helping hand in getting rid of the mercury-based vaccinations, not by destroying them but by selling them and exporting them to other countries.
The transcripts convinced Kennedy that the dangers of vaccinations were real, pointing out that other countries, including Russia, had banned the mercury-based additive from vaccinations decades ago. He goes on to say that the clear conflict of interest and the connections between the CDC and the financial interests of the drug companies make it clear that something needs to be done.
The story hasn't had an easy run of it. Originally, it first appeared in both Salon and Rolling Stone. Salon retracted the story, while it remained up on the Rolling Stone site in a pay-only section, until disappearing in what they called a "redesign error." The article then reappeared, and Rolling Stone denied that they had purposely removed it, even though there were no links to the article anywhere, and search terms turned up nothing.
According to Kennedy, there are two doctors that have had access to the information he did: Mark and David Geiers. The Geiers themselves are controversial at best, promoting what they call a cure for autism that involves chemical castration. Mark Geier's medical license was suspended for promoting this "cure," and David Geier, who wasn't even a doctor, was charged with practicing medicine without a license.
Who doesn't like Myles Power? :)
By Myles Power via YouTube
Myles Power confronts 9/11 truthers to see if their claims can stand up. In this video he discusses the World Trade Center's Design to withstand airplane impacts, fule or oxygen-starved fires, how the World Trade Center's Collapse, the twin towers falling at free fall speed and the damage to the lobbies.
Also See: 9/11: Were Explosives Used? (iLLuMiNuTTi.com)
By Colleen Curry via VICE News
An unclassified document that outlines a US Army training exercise scheduled for this summer includes a color-coded map that refers to Texas as "hostile territory" and calls a portion of California an "insurgent pocket," leading a certain fringe on the internet to claim the exercise is really a dress rehearsal for a government plot to declare martial law.
The training exercise, known as Jade Helm 15, is scheduled to take place between July 15 and September 15 across parts of Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and will involve Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and other Special Ops forces. The uproar is over a slideshow presentation that outlines the effects the exercises might have on local populations. The US Army would not confirm the legitimacy of the document.
On the Sleuth Journal, a website that describes itself as an independent alternative media organization and also sells "preparedness and survival items," author Dave Hodges said the drill was actually about "the brutal martial subjugation of the people of Texas, Utah and Southern California who have risen up against some unspecified tyranny."
"A careful analysis reveals how this drill is connected to Army policies associated with the confinement of detainees in what is commonly called FEMA camps!" Hodge wrote, describing a conspiracy theory in which the government imprisons citizens in FEMA disaster camps. "This drill is undoubtedly the most frightening thing to occur on American soil since the Civil War."
Infowars, the conspiracy-minded site founded by Alex Jones, also published a story on Jade Helm 15, calling it a plan for the "brutal martial law takeover of America [that] labels Texas and Utah as 'hostile' states due to their strong cultural identities."
Also See: Was Alex Jones an alarmist 13 years ago or is he an alarmist today? (iLLuMiNuTTi.com)
A Professor of psychology from Victoria University sheds some light on the conspiracy theories surrounding illuminati.
By matt stewart via Stuff.co.nz
You don't have to be mad to create conspiracy theories, but it certainly helps, new research suggests.
Just believing in them indicates you are more likely to be paranoid or mentally ill, a Victoria University study shows.
Widely held conspiracy theories range from harmless ones, such as the belief that the Moon landings were faked, to more dangerous delusions such as the one in Nigeria that polio vaccines were a Western plot to sterilise people. That led to vaccination crews being murdered and thousands dying from disease.
Clinical psychologist Darshani Kumareswaran is delving in to the psychology of conspiracy belief, and has found some believers are likely to endorse far-fetched plots in an effort to make sense of chaotic situations beyond their control.
Kumareswaran, who graduated from Victoria with a PhD in psychology this week, wanted to find out what made people more likely to believe in, or come up with, conspiracy theories – and whether the process was linked to mental illness.
Avid conspiracy theorists can put themselves under intense psychological strain with their tendency towards paranoid thinking and delusional beliefs, causing mental strain even when a conspiracy theory turns out to be a verified plot.
She also looked behind the common public image of the conspiracy theorist as a crackpot.
Despite evidence of verified conspiracies, such as the Watergate scandal, the public viewed conspiracy theorists in as negative a light as they did convicted criminals, she said.
"For the label to be so negatively rated by the public is quite a powerful finding."
Study participants were asked to recall a situation in which they had no control, describe it in detail, and write it down. They were then put in a "psychological space" in which they felt powerlessness and were given 24 pictures that looked like snowy television screens.
Half featured obscured objects such as a chair or tent, the other half nothing.
Those who scored highly on a form of psychopathology known as schizotypy were more likely to see an object in the images where there was none, indicating they were more likely to make connections between unrelated things.
"I also found that someone who creates conspiracy theories is more likely to have some form of psychopathology, or mental illness such as . . .
By Ali Gray via yahoo
Stanley Kubrick was one of the greatest and most fastidious directors to ever live – but because he died in 1999, he wasn't around to debunk the ridiculous conspiracy theories that his finest works would end up attracting. Thus, the Kubrick canon is a breeding ground for insane alternative viewpoints, including but not limited to alien sex cults to fake Moon landings. Now, as '2001: A Space Odyssey' enjoys a re-release, we present the strangest Stanley Kubrick theories out there – and they certainly are out there…
'2001: A Space Odyssey' proves the existence of aliens
This one requires you to make the small suspension of disbelief that Stanley Kubrick faked the Moon landings for the US government – no biggie. The reason he'd agree to such a thing, however, was because apparently, aliens beat us to it: there really was a Moon landing, but the version the public saw was shot by Kubrick to cover up the fact that the Apollo 11 mission was to cover up to the retrieval of alien technology. Gnostic scholar Jay Weidner suggests that '2001: A Space Odyssey' – released one year before the Moon landing – was actually a "research and development project" that gave Kubrick the tools he needed to create the fake Apollo footage. And… exhale.
'Dr Strangelove' was a warning about flouride
If you've seen Kubrick's cold war comedy – which actually started life as a deadly serious drama, before the actual Cold War ended up being stranger than fiction – you'll be familiar with insane American general Jack D. Ripper (played by Sterling Hayden, above), who waxes lyrical on the Russians being behind fluoridisation: "the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face". Some viewers think this is as straightforward as Kubrick warning about the dangers of fluoride (in high concentration it can be poisonous) but other theorists go even deeper down the rabbit hole, suggesting that the director intentionally made the character of Ripper insane to discredit those who believed fluoride was a serious threat. We're not sure why he'd bother with all that, but there you go.
By Will Storr via The Telegraph
The best conspiracy theories are like enchanting mazes of logic whose thresholds, once crossed, are hard to return from. As ludicrous as they can appear from a distance, the closer you get, the stronger their gravity and the greater the danger of being sucked in. How else to describe the extraordinary rebirth of David Icke? Best known to some as the former BBC sports presenter who appeared on Wogan in a turquoise tracksuit implying he might be the son of God, to the post-Twin Towers generation he's the visionary master of conspiracy, performing his unscripted 10-hour lecture about the secret forces that rule the world to sell-out crowds at Wembley Arena.
A 2011 BBC poll found that 14 per cent of Britons believed 9/11 was an inside job. Just as conspiracy websites are flourishing, so are those dedicated to undermining them, such as Snopes, The Skeptic's Dictionary and Skeptoid. The number one debunking podcast on iTunes, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, claims a weekly listenership of 120,000 and tens of millions of downloads since its 2005 launch.
Icke often describes his work as "dot connecting". But connecting dots is precisely how all sorts of mistakes about reality arise. "Our brains evolved to spot patterns in the environment and weave them into coherent stories," says psychologist and conspiracy theory expert Dr Rob Brotherton. "We're all conspiracy theorists because of the way our minds work. It's how we make sense of the world. But it's easy to connect dots that shouldn't be connected."So humans are rampant dodgy dot connectors, and they also suffer from an array of biases that make them susceptible to faulty belief. "We're biased towards seeing intentions in the world, to think things were done deliberately instead of being chaotic," says Dr Brotherton.
"There's also a proportionality bias, so we want to think that when something big happens in the world it has a big explanation. In the case of JFK, you don't want to believe some guy you've never heard of killed the most important man in the world and changed the course of history. Another is confirmation bias – when we get an idea in our head it's very easy to find evidence that seems to support it. It takes a very unusual mind to de-convince itself. We're made to believe."
And some of the theories out there at the moment really take some believing. Here are five: . . .
By Mason I. Bilderberg
Before i forget …
This is a video i recently saw on a facebook webpage.
The video shows a large convoy of tractor trailer trucks traveling on Virginia's Interstate 64 being escorted by State Troopers. Take a look:
As i watched the video i couldn't think of why these trucks would be driving in such a formation (I've included the answer at the bottom of this post). I didn't think much of it, really. Most people didn't think much of it. That's because when most people don't know who, what, where, why or when, they simply say "I don't know." But not conspiracists …
When confronted with an unknown, conspiracists immediately fill their information void with something they want to believe (usually some kind of apocalyptic plan by lizard people to starve, kill, destroy and otherwise control earth people). It's this ability by conspiracists to build a confirmation bias echo chamber out of absolutely nothing that i find really, really entertaining.
So now, for your entertainment, here are just a few of the comments i found associated with this video. Enjoy the lunacy.
So what is reality? Why were these trucks being escorted down a highway in Virginia? Read the government's "cover story" here courtesy snopes.com.
Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB)
By Andrew Whalen via iDigitalTimes
Gang stalking is a highly coordinated operation, usually by a counterintelligence entity, to intimidate dissenters through a mob of watchers, harassers, prank callers, hackers, and irritants. To be gang stalked is to suspect everyone, to feel eyes fall upon you and not be sure whether it's just another person in the grocery aisle or an agent paid to induce that exact feeling of uncertainty in your heart. And while gang stalking can be coordinated by anyone, from a personal enemy to the Mafia, the coordination tactics enabled by modern communication technologies and sheer computing power is most available to large corporations and governmental entities.
Gang stalking is also nonsense.
Gang Stalking Youtube Video – Window Into Delusion
Watch this Youtube video and you'll immediately understand why:
The transparent paranoia in this Youtube video is evident to all but the gang stalking initiate.
Gang stalking, as experienced by most of its victims, is delusional. It's the most serious conspiracy theory not because it reflects reality, but because gang stalking is the bridge between conspiracy theorizing as a hobby, and conspiracy theorizing as an all-consuming mental illness.
Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories
People who believe that H1N1 Swine Flu was created by the miltary, that 9/11 was a Mossad operation, that world leaders worship owl demons at a summer retreat, or believe any of the endless permutations of conspiracy theory, are likely not mentally ill. My preferred theory is that they're just incredibly dumb, but the current research into conspiracy theory ideation doesn't really back that up either. Rather, conspiracy theorists are sane people, of normal intelligence, who have become trapped in a self-reinforcing belief system. It's a convenient trick: anyone who can offer up evidence against the conspiracy theory is an agent of the conspiracy theory–a shill–sent to deceive you.
There are many motivations for believing in a conspiracy theory.
Originally posted June 12, 2012.
Enjoy :)
|In 1871, a man named Albert Pike published a book called Morals and Dogma.
Conspiracists call this book a manifesto, a primary doctrine for Masons and, contained within its pages is absolute proof Albert Pike was a Satanist who wrote secret Satan worship into the degrees of the Scottish Rite.
Who is Albert Pike? What is his book about? What was the extent of his influence? Do Freemasons worship Satan?
By Leif Pettersen via USA TODAY
The items on this varied list may not all warrant heightened vigilance and tin foil hats, but better safe than sorry. So we're all better prepared for welcoming the Lizard People, when they finally choose to reveal themselves, and assimilating to the New World Order, here are some of the best conspiracy theories and urban legends in the U.S.
10 • Area 51, probably underground, Nev.
Arguably, the country's most famous conspiracy theory is focused on this remote part of Edwards Air Force Base in Southern Nevada. Also known as Groom Lake, it's assumed the base is used to test aircraft and weapons systems. The air space overhead is absolutely restricted. Even Air Force pilots aren't allowed to breach the perimeter. The extraordinary secrecy surrounding the base has fueled several Area 51 conspiracy theories over the years ranging from a lab/prison for studying aliens (both living and dead), a meeting place for Earthlings and aliens working in tandem on various projects, reverse engineering and testing of captured/recovered alien technology, developing a weather control system, time travel and teleportation technology and much more. All that said, nothing can be certain as everything that occurs in Area 51 is classified as "Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information." The CIA didn't publicly acknowledge the existence of the base until July 2013.
9 • Denver Airport, Colo.
Another conspiracy theory layer cake spot is Denver International Airport. That it was built while Denver had a perfectly good airport much closer to the city is the jumping off point for these theories. (For the record, experts have pointed out that the runway layout at the old airport was no longer efficient enough for the increased traffic.) It's believed that building the new airport allowed for the secret construction of an underground headquarters for the Illuminati, or the New World Order, or the Neo-Nazis, or the Lizard People and so on. The vaguely Swastika-shaped runways, the (admittedly) disturbing murals and sculptures, and odd words engraved in the floor also fuel the theories. Furthermore, there is the question of funding. A stone in the terminal says the airport was funded by "The New World Airport Commission," a nebulous entity, sanely theorized to be a group of local businesses, though many claim it doesn't exist.
8 • UFO cover-up, Roswell, N.M.
Though it's now mainly fueled by local businesses wanting to cash in on tourist interest, the (alleged!) Roswell UFO incident of 1947 is the most popular (alleged!) UFO cover-up of all time and still merits time and energy among conspiracy theorists and movie/TV writers. Various people claim that a spacecraft with alien occupants crashed on a ranch near Roswell in June or July 1947, which was quietly hauled away for study, possibly by our friends at Area 51. The Air Force reported at the time that the object was a surveillance balloon. The conspiracy chatter didn't flare up until 1978 when Major Jesse Marcel, who was involved with the recovery of the debris, gave an interview describing a spacecraft crash cover-up by the military. Since then additional witnesses have emerged, describing the cover-up and alien autopsies. These days, even passionate pro-UFO advocates generally dismiss Roswell as a hoax.
7 • Grassy knoll in Dallas, Texas
The Warren Commission concluded that there was no conspiracy involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. However, after Lee Harvey Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby, an event that also brims with conspiracy, the theories that Oswald didn't act alone or maybe wasn't involved at all started flying. The situation was exacerbated in 1979 when the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations announced "…a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President." Furthermore, while he was living in Belarus, it's said Oswald was such a terrible shot that friends were afraid to go hunting with him. The dazzling list of conspiracy theories put forward at one point or another involve the collusion of one or more parties including the CIA, the FBI and/or FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, anti-Castro Cuban exile groups, Castro himself, then Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the KGB.
6 • Kensington Runestone, Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minn.
Evidence that Scandinavian explorers pushed as far as the Midwest of the future United States in the 14th century or a 19th-century hoax? The Kensington Runestone is a 200 lb slab of greywacke inscribed with runes on the face and side. The story goes the stone was found in 1898 in the rural township of Solem, Minnesota (it gets its name from Kensington, a nearby settlement) by Swedish immigrant Olof Olsson Ohman. The Stone appears to describe an expedition of Norwegians and Swedes who camped in the area, then retreated to their boat at "the inland sea" after 10 were slaughtered by unknown assailants. Runologists and linguistic experts overwhelming agree that the language used on the stone is too modern (circa the 19th century, coincidentally) and didn't match other writing samples from the 1300s. However, the legend persists, being occasionally revived with new evidence and arguments, some as recently the 1990s.
5 • D.B. Cooper airplane hijack, ransom and parachute jump, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest
The only unsolved case of air piracy in U.S. history was perpetrated by an unidentified man who the media came to call "D. B. Cooper." (The hijacker purchased his ticket using the alias "Dan Cooper.") On November 24, 1971, Cooper hijacked a passenger plane (a Boeing 727) during a Portland-Seattle flight. Claiming he had a bomb, he made his ransom plans known to the crew. On the ground in Seattle, Cooper released the passengers after officials gave him the requested $200,000 (equivalent to $1,160,000 today) and two parachutes. With only Cooper and the crew aboard, the plane then took off heading for Mexico. When they stopped in Reno to refuel, Cooper was gone, having jumped from the rear stairs while the plane was likely still over Washington State. Cooper was never found and it's widely believe he couldn't have possibly survived the fall, over remote mountainous wilderness, at night, wearing a trench coat and loafers, no helmet, into an initial wind chill at the airplane's altitude of "70∞ F. The FBI investigation into the case remains open to this day.
by Gordon Bonnet via Skeptophilia
New from the "Wow, You People Really Get Upset About Everything, Don't You?" department, we have a conspiracy theorist who thinks that the Evil Government Agents are marking our mailboxes with color-coded dots for some ominous purpose.
The dots, which are about three inches across, are either bright red, blue, or yellow. And according to the aforementioned wackmobile, the whole idea is so that they can keep track of who is headed for termination:
More and more people are reporting their mail box or their house has been marked with color stickers or marks. Are these the FEMA death camp markings for foreign troops to gather us when the government declares martial law? In some area, even the local police & utility companies don't even know why they are there.
He then follows it up with a couple of videos, showing his mailbox and a neighbor's mailbox that have stickers. And lo, one of them was red and one of them was blue, as was foretold by the prophecy. Worse still, one of the mailboxes had the lock forced. He talked to a guy at the post office, who said that the blue sticker meant that there was a forwarding order on that address. The guy who made the video, who calls himself "Master Paul," draws from this the following breathtaking conclusion:
If blue means "forward," why is (the neighbor's) red? There are a lot of conspiracy theories on YouTube. This is not a conspiracy theory. You're seeing it. Red and blue!
Yup. We saw it. Red and blue. And therefore FEMA death camps and martial law and public floggings of American citizens, or something.
To hammer home the point, we're shown the following map, illustrating where stickered mailboxes have been reported to Master Paul et al.:
So after seeing all of this, I had to . . .
Also See: FEMA is marking mailboxes with colored dots to indicate the disposition of residents in the New World Order. (Snopes)
By Stuff They Don't Want You to Know via YouTube
For decades Fidel Castro ruled Cuba — and the CIA continuously tried to assassinate him. Some of their plans seemed orthodox, but others were outrageous (and even involved organized crime).
Via Depleted Cranium
First, a basic primer on what RFID's are:
An RFID is a small computer chip which holds a very small amount of information, typically just a string of numbers, letters or other symbols. The chip has a tiny radio transmitter in it, and when a reader is brought near it, it will broadcast that data so it can be read by the reading device, which contains a radio receiver.
Importantly, RFID's are not self-powered. They are far too tiny for any kind of battery capacity. Instead, the RFID reader energizes the RFID with an electromagnetic field. When the RFID is placed in the field, it becomes activated and transmits the code it contains. As a result, RFID's can't be read from any substansial distance. But they can be read even if they are covered, such as if they are on the inside of a box or embedded in an object.
They also do not have any actual computing power. They can't receive GPS signals or transmit data, because they lack sensors and receivers. They simply spit out their internal code when energized.
RFID's are therefore analogous to bar codes. The major difference is that a barcode needs to be visible, on the outside of an item and reading it requires finding it and directing a scanner at it. RFID's have the advantage of working when obscured and of being readable by running the reader over an item, even if the exact location of the RFID is unknown. They can therefore be used to inventory merchandise while it is still on the shelf or to track multiple items as they move through a system. They can also be embedded in things like credit cards or security passes, allowing them to be used by just holding them near a reader.
RFID's can also be implanted. A typical RFID implant is about the size and shape of a grain of rice. It contains the chip inside a biologically inert material which is shaped to allow it to be inserted through a very small incision or even injected with a thick needle. A few individuals have chosen to have an RFID implanted as a way of accessing secure systems. This works a lot like biometrics, but may be more robust. When implanted with an RFID, an individual can do things like open locks and sign onto secure computers by just waving their hand infr0nt of a reader. (Presuming, of course, that their hand is where it is implanted.)
This is rare, however. Only a few people have RFID's in their body and it's largely just a way of being a super early-adopted. It will earn you some definite nerd points.
Implantable RFID's are common for pets, however. The RFID acts as a tag that cannot be easily removed or lost. Once implanted, the pet can be tracked back to its owner if it ever gets lost and is picked up by an animal shelter. Animal shelters typically have RFID readers on site and will scan a dog or cat when they are found without identification. If the animal has an RFID, then the unique code it carries is displayed on the reader. This code can be used to find the owners in a database.
But what about mass implantation in people without their consent?
This is a common thread in conspiracy theories. Some have claimed that the government (or some other evil organization) is planning on or has already begun putting RFID's in the bodies of unsuspecting citizens. Allegedly this is to track their movements and keep tabs on them. Others claim it is part of a mind-control system.
Of course, despite claims that they can be used for realtime tracking, an RFID cannot be used for this at all. As mentioned, it is only energized when it comes in close proximity to the receiver. It could, however, be used to identify individuals when they entered certain areas which are equipped with readers for the RFID's.
Arguably this could be done without RFID readers at all. A simple fingerprint scanner and identify and individual from a database of fingerprints. However, RFID's would have the advantage of allowing it to be done more covertly, perhaps without the subjects knowledge.
There is no evidence that this has ever been done, however… or is there?
Just hang in until the 1:15 minute mark. You WON'T be disappointed. Trust me.
We partnered with "Weird Al" to create this music video for his new album, "Mandatory Fun." Also featuring Patton Oswalt, Tom Lennon, and Robert Ben Garant.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's new album Mandatory Fun out now: http://smarturl.it/MandatoryFun
By Benjamin Radford via Center for Inquiry
I've recently written about conspiracy theories, which means I have been recently attacked by conspiracy theorists. I thought I'd take a moment to briefly reflect on the evolution of conspiracy theorist…
The conspiracy theorist is, of course, not a new breed of human. All the basic psychological building blocks of conspiracy thinking are inherent in the human psyche, including distrust of authority, wanting "inside information," and real or imagined persecution-and, to be fair, often a dearth of critical thinking skills such as the ability (or desire) to separate anonymous rumor from established fact.
The conspiracy theory is at its heart a profoundly populist notion. It's the common man demanding a peek behind the curtains of power-power in the form of information. Knowledge is power and information is the currency of conspiracists. For millennia there were no conspiracy theorists to speak of because most people had little or no access to independent information. News traveled very slowly from region to region, and anyway it didn't really matter because there wasn't much news anyway ("uncle Abraham's cow died, more news as it happens"). Information and knowledge about the world came mostly from religious leaders. What went on in distant lands (or even neighboring countries) had little relevance to most people who spent their lives farming or fishing, living and dying without ever having strayed more than a few hundred miles from their birthplace.
The invention of the moveable type printing press was a boon to conspiracy theorists for the simple reason that books and knowledge was transportable. Instead of one source of knowledge there were dozens, or perhaps hundreds, and in some cases the authors had different viewpoints on the same subjects. As the old saying goes, a man with one watch knows what time it is, but a man with two watches is never sure. If two authors disagreed, then someone claiming to be an authority was wrong-or even perhaps intentionally deceptive and intentionally hiding a truth.
Modern technology helped give birth to the modern conspiracy theorist as well. Decades ago conspiracy theorists largely relied on short-wave radio and crude stapled-and-photocopied mailings to gain followers and spread their enlightened truths. In the 1980s personal computers allowed conspiracy writers to create much more professional publications-in appearance, if not content-as well as "underground" magazines. One fascinating exception is the curious case of the . . .
By Dennis Mersereau via gawker
In 2003, Barbra Streisand frantically tried to censor pictures of her home in Malibu after someone posted them online. In 2003, millions of people saw pictures of Barbra Streisand's home in Malibu. In what became known as the Streisand effect, attempts to suppress information about something usually backfires and leads to even more publicity for the supposedly secret thing.
There is a strong argument in the weather community that we should ignore the growing number of people who sincerely believe that there is a worldwide governmental conspiracy to control the weather through, among other means, "chemtrails." Bringing attention to their cause, one may argue, only helps to attract more attention and thereby more adherents to this particular brand of anti-science.
While that is probably true for a small number of people, ignoring the conspiracy theorists only makes them scream louder for attention through the Streisand Effect. The best way to remedy a situation isn't to bottle it up and pretend that it isn't happening, but rather to shine light on it and expose the silliness for what it really is.
If you're not familiar with the chemtrail conspiracy theory, let me fill you in real quick. The thin, wispy clouds left behind by high-flying aircraft are known as contrails, short for condensation trails. These clouds are left behind as a result of the warm, moist exhaust of the plane's engines meeting the extremely cold temperatures of the upper atmosphere. It's a similar principle behind why you can see your breath on cold mornings.
Contrails appear and disappear based on the moisture content of the air through which the plane is passing. If the upper atmospheric air is moist, the plane will leave a contrail that could last hours and spread out into a deck of cirrus. If the air is extremely dry, it might not leave a contrail at all.
Since about the mid-1990s, there's a subset of people who believe that these contrails are really chemtrails, or trails of vaporized chemicals being sprayed into the atmosphere by aircraft that are really flying around with with tanks full of chemicals rather than passengers. These alleged chemtrails are the work of any number of groups: governments, companies, Jews, you name it. The ultimate goal differs depending on whom you ask, but the two biggest strains of thought are that the chemtrails exist to control the weather or make the populace sick.
For most people with a basic level of science education, the idea is absurd, but the conspiracy theorists truly believe that these chemicals are being sprayed to control the weather, make the population sick, or partake in other "geoengineering" activities.
Back to the theorists themselves. Take last week's post on chemtrails, for example. It attracted a good bit of attention in the conspiracy circles, and quite a bit of ire directed towards me. Most of it is innocuous, with the typical name calling and impassioned cries of "you're a shill and you're wrong, we have the real truth!"
Underneath the vitriol, you can sense that there's something…wrong, for lack of a better way to put it. For the most part these are not the rantings of people who have mental health issues or who are angry or have an agenda, but rather they are scared. They truly, deeply believe that there are people spraying us from above, and they are scared.
When you're scared, you only accept what you want to hear from people. When the nurse tells you that the needle won't hurt, you smile because that's what you want to hear even though you know it's going to hurt anyway. The conspiracy theorists don't want to hear that their fears are irrational. They want a noble soothsayer to tell them that they're not buying into a bunch of manure and that somehow, someway, it's going to be all right because they have the truth.
By Chez Pazienza via The Daily Banter
It's difficult to imagine the kind of suffering the family of Grace McDonnell has endured. In some ways it feels disrespectful to even believe you can, given the enormity of what happened to them. The same can no doubt be said for the parents and loved ones of all the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting. And yet Grace's parents, in particular, have been subjected not only to the relentless pain of losing their young daughter, but, recently, to the psychopathic whims of those who believe their child never existed in the first place — those who believe that she was some kind of phantasm concocted by faceless nefarious entities trying to pull a fast one on the American public for who knows what reason. These people, Sandy Hook truthers, are a unique product of our time: self-righteous fools full of misplaced intellectual certitude, bolstered by digital misinformation and the confederacy of like-minded lunatics social media can provide to them.
It was one of these truthers, these conspiracy theorists to whom notions like logic and reason are meaningless, who stole a sign placed at a memorial playground honoring Grace McDonnell in Mystic, Conn. last week. This same person then called Lynn McDonnell, Grace's still-grieving mother, and told her that he was on to her — that her child had never been real and was merely part of the elaborate hoax that was Sandy Hook. When news of this began making the rounds, most decent people responded as you would expect them to: with visceral outrage. I myself wrote a piece here in response to the provocation that attempted to call-out the monster responsible. It was titled "An Open Letter To Whoever Stole a Sandy Hook Victim's Memorial Sign" and through The Daily Banter and The Huffington Post it received a good amount of attention and circulation. It even received, it seems, the attention of the person it was aimed at — the person who actually stole the sign.
On Tuesday, my co-worker and friend Bob Cesca called me out of the blue to pass along a pretty disturbing bit of information. He said that he had just taken a call from a relative of his who lives in Northern Virginia, and that this relative told him that a stranger had just shown up at his doorstep demanding to see Bob. The man apparently was hoping to talk to Bob in an effort to contact me. He claimed to be the person who had stolen the sign from Grace McDonnell's memorial playground. He gave Bob's relative a local public phone number and asked him to get in contact with Bob who would then get in contact with me and tell me to give him a call. My first thought upon hearing this, after being concerned for the safety of Bob's family, was that whoever had appeared out of the blue in Northern Virginia looking for me wasn't really anyone I wanted to speak to. He may have made a surprising — and somewhat disconcerting — amount of effort to get in touch with me, but that didn't mean he was anything more than a garden variety nutjob who'd read my piece and wanted to take credit for an unconscionable offense in the name of getting attention. But I took down the number and called it as soon as I hung up with Bob.
The person who answered the line sounded lucid, which made it all the more unnerving that what he began saying right off the bat was a panoply of conspiratorial crazy. He asked me if I'd heard of the Illuminati. If I knew about Bohemian Grove. If I understood that my ex-employer CNN was helping to usher in the New World Order. He kept referring to Anderson Cooper as my former boss, for some reason. (I never worked on Cooper's show and even if I had he wouldn't have technically been my boss.) He insisted that during CNN's Sandy Hook coverage, Cooper had held up an owl, which he said was the symbol of Bohemian Grove and those working to bring about a one-world government. When I told him that I personally knew about a dozen people who covered Sandy Hook and were on-scene in the aftermath of the shooting, he demanded to know if those people had actually seen any bodies. He insisted, among other supposed giveaways, that none of the parents of the Sandy Hook victims cried on camera, proving that they either weren't actually grieving or were paid actors.
"Well, they can't help but smile," I said. "You would too if you were a member of the Illuminati."
"Exactly!" he responded.
While we have been looking up, the government has been taking us down!
The government has head-faked we the people! All this time, while we have been looking up at the sky and cursing all those chemtrails, the government has been poisoning us down low!!!!!
By Estelle Thurtle via Listverse
Man-made climate change paved the way for American scientists to come up with the idea of weather modification. They reasoned that if daily human activity was already impacting weather patterns, it was acceptable for them to deliberately change the weather for a variety of purposes.
The first meeting about weather modification was held at the end of 1945. At this time, the possibility of using several weather manipulation schemes to America's advantage during war was discussed. Later, during the Cold War, funds were poured into further research on the topic. This opened the door for using the weather as a secret weapon against enemies. Unfortunately, it also created the opportunity for several people and institutions to use this technology for more sinister purposes. Naturally, this topic is taboo within government organizations, but this hasn't stopped the theories and even evidence of different "climate engineering events" from popping up all over the Internet.
Many believe that Hurricane Sandy was a product of man-made climate change. Then there are those who believe that the storm itself was man-made. The storm was not even over yet when conspiracy theories started flying around. It is said that President Barack Obama engineered the superstorm that slammed into the eastern seaboard just a week before elections were due to take place to ensure his reelection. Proponents of the theory conclude that Obama needed a situation in which he could be the "hero," helping those in need and ultimately proving he was the best candidate for president.
Conspiracy or not, Hurricane Sandy certainly seemed to help Obama's presidential bid. He even won over Republican governor Chris Christie, who commented that he "kept every promise he made" when the hurricane struck. Christie declared at a press conference that although he disagreed with the president on principles and policy, he had no regrets working with him, a statement for which the governor received considerable backlash. It fueled rumors of an engineered storm, as it seemed that Obama was out to get even the opposition into his corner.
How would a human even be able to engineer a hurricane? If you believe the theories, it would be possible with the help of The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), a government research arm that studies the upper atmosphere. It is believed that HAARP was instrumental in creating Sandy with electromagnetic waves and its SBX platform. Conspiracy theorists are also convinced that Hurricane Katrina was created and steered by HAARP under the order of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Naturally, HAARP denies any involvement.
In 1952, 90 million tons of water swept through Lynmouth, a village in Devon. The disaster claimed the lives of 35 people, and 430 lost their homes. It was deemed an "act of God" and a terrible tragedy. However, rumors began to surface that rainmaking experiments may have been to blame for the excessive flooding. It was estimated that the Lynmouth region received 252 times their usual rainfall during the flooding, and it happened within a week of the rainfall experiments undertaken by the Royal Air Force.
It may seem like a creepy coincidence, but it appears to be just that. Experts noted that while rainmaking experiments did indeed take place, only individual cumulus clouds were injected with iodide or dry ice. This led to accelerated rainfall that lasted only about 20 minutes. Furthermore, the flood was not confined to Lynmouth. Heavy showers were reported all over West and South Wales.
Monsoon season in Vietnam is bad enough without interference from government, but during the Vietnam War, the American government attempted to extend monsoon season by at least 30 days by seeding the clouds over the area with silver and lead iodide. This top secret campaign was known as Operation Popeye and ran from 1967–1972. It allegedly focused on increasing rainfall over the resupply routes in the area, particularly the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The plan was kept under wraps until 1971, when a reporter uncovered a memo secretly sent to President Johnson. The memo contained the following message: "Laos operations—Continue as at present plus Pop Eye to reduce the trafficability [sic] along infiltration routes & Authorization requested to implement operational phase of weather modification process previously successful tested and evaluated in some area."
The reporter, Jack Anderson, wasted no time in bringing this information to the public. This ultimately led to the proposal of a treaty between the US and other governments to prohibit the use of weather modification technology during wartime. The ENMOD (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques) was signed in 1976 by a host of UN members, ensuring that all forms of weather manipulation are only used for peaceable means.
The American government may deny that Operation Popeye was intended to increase rainfall for sinister purposes, but the conspiracy theories surrounding the project aren't going away anytime soon.
The Hmong people sided with the US during the Vietnam War. This was not taken lightly by the countries of Vietnam and Laos, who declared a different kind of war on the Hmong tribes: chemical warfare. Witnesses described seeing yellow-colored rain falling from the sky that had an oily texture and seemed to cling to whatever it landed on. Others reported seeing helicopters flying low over the land and spraying the oily liquid over the area.
It seemed that the "yellow rain" had some form of acid in it. Many who came into contact with it claimed to have had seizures, and others even alleged that it blinded them permanently. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, similar statements were made by the Cambodian people.
Interestingly enough, it seems that experts have now concluded that yellow rain was, in fact, the feces of honeybees, making all of the above just an elaborate conspiracy theory. It was also concluded that the toxins found in the yellow rain were naturally produced by fungi in the bee feces.
In May 2013, a state of drought was declared in California that persisted throughout the rest of the year, the state's driest year to date. In December, a massive wildfire broke out near Big Sur, thought to have been spurred by the dry spell. More than 900 acres of land were destroyed in the blaze. The drought continued into 2014.
The logical explanation given by scientists was that the drought was the result of global warming, man-made climate change, or both. Conspiracy theorists are not buying it, though. They are convinced that geo-engineering is to blame for the drought. According to theorists, geo-engineers have cut the rainfall in California with the continuous spraying of aerosols and use of ionosphere heating. By turning California into a desert, its citizens will be at the mercy of the government to supply food they can no longer provide for themselves, leaving the government in total control of the population.
Proponents of the theory are even going as far as to say that there is no natural weather anymore. They believe that continued geo-engineering has caused the planet's natural climate system to stop functioning. Now, the geo-engineers are simply making up weather patterns as they go along, hurtling America into a state of weather warfare.
By Mike Rothschild via Skeptoid
If you want to dispense racist, historically ignorant nonsense about wealthy Jews, you can hardly do better than Facebook. Quite a few memes have been going around about the Rothschild family (which, full disclosure, I have absolutely no link to other than having the same last name) and I wanted to take a look at three that caught my eye.
The first is a picture of prominent family member Jacob Rothschild, a respected British investment banker and a direct descendent of Mayer Amschel Rothschild. While Jacob is renowned for his business acumen and philanthropy, this particular meme isn't so respectful, contrasting him to a crudely drawn picture of billionaire tyrant character Montgomery Burns from the Simpsons.
There's also some text, full of the usual Rothschild-related distortions and lies. Part of it reads:
"My family is worth 500 trillion dollars."
This is a ludicrous accusation that seems to have appeared out of thin air and been accepted as gospel truth by internet conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites. It obviously doesn't pass the smell test, but just to be sure I looked for the source of the claim. There isn't one, or at least not one I could find. It appears to be completely made up. It's also impossible. The entire amount of financial assets held by the population of the earth is a bit less than $200 trillion. As of 2011, the total worth of the derivatives market was about $600 trillion, and there's nowhere near enough money in the world to pay that off should the need arise.
The richest living member of the Rothschild family, Benjamin de Rothschild, is estimated to be worth about two billion dollars. Only two Rothschilds, but not Jacob, appear on the Forbes list of richest people in the world – which, of course, has led to a separate conspiracy about Forbes colluding with the family to keep their true wealth quiet. But not so quiet as to keep internet sleuths in the dark, I guess.
As usual, this is a nugget of information that only those "with their eyes open" know.
"We own nearly every central bank in the world."
There are all kinds of goofy conspiracies about the Rothschilds having central banks in all but 3 or 7 or 9 countries. However, as Brian pointed out in his Skeptoid episode about the Rothschild conspiracy theory, the era of the Rothschilds "controlling the world's money supply" is long over. There are far more powerful banks around the world, controlling far greater sums of money.
The very fabric of the claim is silly. A "central bank" is by definition . . .
By Crispian Jago via The Reason Stick
Had enough government rhetoric? Tired of following the sheeple? Fed up with believing what THEY want you to believe? Maybe it's time to branch out and discover THE TRUTH.
If you're new to the exciting world of conspiracy theories and just can't decide which paranoid delusion best suits you, then why not use this handy flowchart to find your ideal conspiracy theory. Then you too can go and stick it to THE MAN.
"You know, this explains a lot. Because all my life, I've had this unaccountable feeling in my bones that something sinister was happening in the universe and that no one would tell me what it was." Arthur Dent
NB This is not intended to be a complete list, but please don't let that stop you commenting to let me know what I've missed off :)
Description via Walid ShoebatWalid Shoebat:
Perhaps one of the biggest problems with people who traffic in endless conspiracy theories is that nothing – absolutely nothing – can be taken at face value. In the clip below from Iran's Press TV, a man identified as Political Commentator named Dr. Kevin Barrett weaves a conspiracy theory so convoluted, it might cause you to space out at some point. Stick with it though because he brings it all home by implicating Jacob Rothschild in the missing Malaysian airliner mystery.
The original video can be found here on YouTube but, honestly, don't bother, it's just more of the same ol' mumbo-jumbo nonsense from the lunatics.
So, what to do?
Here . . . watch this version of the video that i made with my own two skeptical hands. This is how seriously all these nut jobs should be taken:
Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB)
By Ian O'Doherty via Independent.ie
Well, that's a bit of a bummer, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, so the families of the 239 people who went down on Flight MH370 will finally find some much-needed closure. And sure, when you're feeling all grown up and mature about things, you are prepared to accept that the 300 pieces of wreckage they found in the ocean yesterday provides incontrovertible proof that the airliner crashed. But still, aren't you just a little bit disappointed? Isn't the truth so banal and uninteresting?
In fact, such were the similarities between this case and Lost that people are now looking at the mundane facts of the crash with as much disappointment as they felt when they watched the last ever episode of that infuriating show.
Obviously, any time a plane crashes, it's news. The bigger the plane the bigger the story, and they don't get much bigger than the Boeing 777 which, until now, had an enviable flying record. But what we've witnessed over the last two weeks quickly waved goodbye to mere 'news'; and became a febrile asylum of claims, accusations and conspiracies, the madder the better.
But, as fascinating as any plane crash is, and understandable though it may have been for people to fill their gaps in information with deranged theories, one simple fact remained – planes crash, bad things happen and people die all the time. The simple truth is that sometimes we would do well to remember the words of that wise sage Homer Simpson who reminds us that life is just a bunch of stuff that happens.
It became depressingly obvious just how far the once respectable trade of journalism has slipped when CNN anchor Don Lemon devoted an entire section of his show to possible 'supernatural' explanations, which saw him actually ask his guests: "Is it preposterous to consider a black hole as a possibility?"
Well, the simple answer to that question is… um, yes, it is extremely preposterous. And dumb. And scientifically absurd. Having dealt with the black hole theory – the guests declared they thought it an unlikely explanation – the Bermuda Triangle was then discussed as a possible culprit. Now, I'm no expert, but I would have thought the Bermuda Triangle was located somewhere around, um, Bermuda, rather than the Indian Ocean.
CNN's sister network, HLN, even featured a psychic, Lisa Williams, who reckoned the plane had landed near water or trees and boasted that: "Naturally, I don't have hard, concrete evidence. I think any psychic who has hard, concrete evidence can't do their job correctly, because they get misinformed."
You have to hand it to her, and the producers who booked her on the programme, because it takes a remarkably hard neck to take pride in eschewing evidence and thinking that hard facts can 'misinform' you. Just as nature hates a vacuum, it's human nature to fill gaps in our knowledge with conjecture. But the possible explanations simply became ever more outlandish, and we saw everybody from Pakistan and Iran to North Korea and the Americans blamed for stealing it, all with the now customary scant evidence.
So now that the mystery seems to have been solved, have people finally regained their senses and started to accept that sometimes a crash is just a crash? Well, not exactly.
By Toni Matthews-El via WebProNews
I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person. For me they're often fascinating takes on unsolved mysteries. Or even solved mysteries.
Unfortunately some individuals take conspiracy theories to a disturbingly excessive extreme.
Ever been accused of being a government plant or paid off by "The Man"? Then you've never run into a hardcore conspiracy theorist. Be grateful, because such encounters are often as baffling as they are annoying.
That statement may ruffle the feathers of those who view such a comment as an attempt to make conspiracy theorists look "bonkers" (a favorite accusation of the more paranoid conspiracy theorists…).
However, at some point people need to be able to back up their arguments with facts and not the assertion that a total stranger is being paid to spread misinformation.
There is a big difference between indulging in the belief that things are being purposely hidden by individuals with nefarious purposes and the need to accuse everyone who doesn't think like you of being on the inside of some master scheme.
It's important to remember that unethical government and business practices are actually readily acknowledged by the average person as these events are often front page news.
[ . . . ]
So when do conspiracy theories go off the rails?
1.) When they are developed based on unsubstantiated fear and bigotry rather than supporting evidence. At the heart of the more bizarre conspiracies is often the belief that the theorist is in danger.
Really, if what you knew was so dangerous, it's logical to believe that you'd already be dead instead of living to blab all over Facebook and Reddit from a computer that's more traceable than you think.
There's actually no reason to be afraid because…
2.) You're just not that special. Some people seek to uncover the truth in order to bring a very real wrong to the attention of the world. Others spend all day discussing their opinion on the internet because of a need to convince the world of how much smarter they are than everyone else.
It's easy to guess which group is useful and proactive and which group is full of ridiculously entitled windbags.
At the end of the day, conspiracy theories are suppose to be centered around a mysterious event. When each discussion is brought around to you and your ego…you've lost the plot.
3.) You are not entitled to know everything. Imagine that you knew everything there is to know about the universe and all events from the beginning to the end of time.
By Stuff They Don't Want You to Know via YouTube
How many underground bases exist today? Is there any way to figure out what's stored in the world's various secret bunkers? Learn more in today's video.
by Mike Rothschild via Skeptoid
The idea that "mysterious deaths" circle around major events or people is central to the mythology of conspiracy theories. From the Clintons and Barack Obama to the JFK assassination and 9/11 to whistleblowing journalists and UFO researchers, those with their eyes opened believe the Globalist Controllers have the power to kill anyone, anywhere and make it look like an accident or suicide.
So when a cluster of bankers and major players in the financial industry died within a few weeks 2014, it raised eyebrows. Even more bizarre is that many of them worked for JP Morgan, are of similar ages and died by either unknown or self-inflicted causes.
Nine "banksters" all dying mysteriously and all within the same short span of time. What's going on here? Are loose ends being tied up? Were they about to go public about something terrible? Is another economic crash around the corner or something even worse, like a financial reset, foreign currency scandal or total economic collapse? Did these poor souls know things they weren't supposed to?
When examining these so called "death lists" it's important not to mistake coincidence for conspiracy. It's also important to get past the click-bait headlines and "just asking questions" ethos of websites in need of ad revenue.
Sure, "nine bankers mysteriously dying in a month" sounds weird and creepy. But every death that occurs for reasons other than natural causes is inherently "mysterious" until the reasons for why it happened are determined. So is there something else that explain this string of deaths, other than "they were taken out by the Powers That Be?"
Let's take a look at the lists, and then we can go from there. In the last month, three JP Morgan employees died, all with different positions and in different cities. They are:
Other sources then add a number of names to the list, anywhere between six and nine bankers who dies under "mysterious circumstances." This is the list that's most commonly being used on sites trying to make a connection between the deaths:
Even just a cursory glance at the list turns the "nine dead banksters" narrative into a shambles. Two of the names, Bird and Slym, had nothing to do with banks or banking, working in journalism and the automotive industry. Two of the others, Broeksmit and Stuart, were . . .
By The Locke via The Soap Box
Prisonplanet and Infowars. Both are Alex Jones's main websites, and both are two of the largest conspiracy theorist websites in the world.
Now there are a lot of things that have been said about these sites, and after taking a look at these two sites I've noticed quite a lot of things about them, which I have narrowed down to five things.
So here are five things I've notice Prisonplanet and Infowars:
5. There are a lot of ads on the sites.
I have no problems with any websites having advertisements on them, and with the size of the websites that Prisonplanet and Infowars are it's necessary for these sites to have advertisements on them in order to make money to both pay people maintain the sites, as well as to pay other employees… and also to make Alex Jones money.
The sites not only have your ordinary, random ads that try to look like news stories, but also ads by sponsors of the sites with products or services that is geared towards the typical fans of Alex Jones (i.e. conspiracy theorists), or it's just advertisements for books and videos and other products that Alex Jones has created himself… or at least he claims to have created. And of course there are also ads for Alex Jones's radio show.
There are also articles on those those sites as well, not just ads, but the thing about that is…
4. Alex Jones doesn't write a lot of articles on those sites.
On any given day if you go to Infowars and Prisonplanet you'll find a whole bunch of articles on there, what you hardly ever see however are articles written by Alex Jones. Infact seeing an article on there that was written by Alex Jones is more rare than seeing an article on there that actually tells the truth instead of being a manipulative form of propaganda.
Not only does Alex Jones not write a whole bunch of article on his sites, but neither does his staff. Many of the articles on those sites are actually from other websites, some of which mainly promote conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, and some are from legitimate news sites.
Even when someone there does write an original article, they always seem to do this one thing…
3. They cherry pick stuff.
Most of the articles on these two sites that are written by actual staff members of Alex Jones's tend to be just cherry picked from other legitimate news articles, with parts of the legitimate news articles being taken apart and having pieces of it taken out of context, and then the writers ad in their own comments to make it sound like the original article agrees with their point of view, even if it doesn't. Or they . . .
Via The Onion – America's Finest News Source
MANCHESTER, NH—Claiming that the evidence is in plain sight for those who want to see it, local man and passionate 9/11 Truth movement supporter Victor Sidwell, 32, told reporters Wednesday that he will not rest until everyone knows that he is a complete asshole.
The zealous Truther, who for more than 10 years has reportedly labored to shed light on the fact that he is an obnoxious blowhard seemingly incapable of keeping his fucking mouth shut, vowed to continue lecturing acquaintances, confronting strangers, and handing out pamphlets on the street in an effort to convince as many people as possible that he's an absolute and utter prick.
"Ever since the so-called terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I've only had one goal in mind: making people realize that I'm a piece of shit," said Sidwell while posting a lengthy list of inconsistencies in the 9/11 Commission Report on a friend's Facebook timeline. "If you take even a cursory look at the available information, it becomes glaringly obvious that I'm an abrasive jackass who routinely drowns out anyone unfortunate enough to get locked into a discussion with me."
"The proof is right there," he continued. "I'm a repugnant, grating fuck, and I won't stop until every single person knows it."
Sidwell has reportedly gone to great lengths to publicize his position as an insufferable loudmouth by diverting every one of his conversations toward the melting point of structural steel, repeatedly calling in to talk radio shows to express his controversial beliefs as to what "really happened" on Flight 93, and placing "What Did Cheney Know?" stickers in bathrooms of numerous local businesses.
Speaking with reporters, the staunch proponent of the "controlled demolition" 9/11 conspiracy theory conceded that it is not always easy making those around him recognize that he is an unapologetic bastard who needs to shut the fuck up and get a life. Sidwell affirmed that, in spite of the challenges, he remains determined to "give a wake-up call" regarding his supreme dickishness to everyone he meets by forcibly engaging them in debates in office break rooms, personal residences, bars, internet message boards, and grocery store checkout lines.
According to the Truther, most of the public remains "trapped inside a bubble" in which they ignorantly perceive him as a rational, well-adjusted member of society. However, he claimed he is making notable progress in convincing more and more of them of the "cold, hard reality" every time he loudly interrupts a friend's conversation in order to voice his suspicions concerning the whereabouts of the hijacked airliners' missing black boxes.
Via The Onion – America's Finest News Source
NEW YORK—Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone said Monday that his new film World Trade Center unveils "compelling and controversial" new evidence that a single plane was responsible for all four collisions in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001.
"Get ready to go through the looking glass here, people," Stone told reporters at a Manhattan press conference before an advance screening of the movie, which premieres Wednesday. "The film you are about to see is going to blow the lid off the 9/11 Commission's official report and expose a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of government."
World Trade Center, which stars Nicolas Cage as a dedicated Port Authority officer who stumbles on secret evidence amid the rubble and carnage of the terrorist attack, tells a story quite different from what Stone called "the official government line" about the event. According to the film, at 8:46 a.m., a lone commercial airliner flew diagonally through the North Tower of the World Trade Center, maintained a circular holding pattern for approximately 17 minutes, then struck the South Tower before heading to the Pentagon.
After its collision with the center of American military operations, the so-called "magic plane"—which variously and ingeniously identified itself to air-traffic controllers as "American Airlines Flight 11,"
"United Airlines Flight 175," "American Airlines Flight 77" and "United Airlines Flight 93″—took to the skies once again, landing at a top-secret "black-ops" Air Force base in West Virginia, where it was reloaded with a group of clones from another shadowy government program that Stone described as "shocking."
Stone, who said he did not have time to explore the clone angle in the three-and-a-half-hour film, plans to do so in the sequel, September 12.
In a gripping sequence, undercover agents transmit pre-recorded cell-phone messages intended to fool loved ones and relatives with a false cover story as the aircraft heads to its final, prearranged crash site in the fields of southwestern Pennsylvania.
Viewers of the advance screening agreed that the most striking and pivotal scene was Cage's character's discovery of . . .
By Ryan Lambie via Den of Geek
"Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face," Sterling Hayden's General Jack D Ripper coldly announces in Stanley Kubrick's breathtakingly funny satire, Dr Strangelove.
Ripper's conspiracy theory, that the commies are secretly trying to compromise our "precious bodily fluids", becomes his harebrained reason for unleashing a missile strike on the USSR. And just as Ripper was inspired by this strange notion to trigger a nuclear apocalypse, so filmmakers have been inspired by conspiracy theories to make all kinds of science fiction and horror movies – some funny, some tense and absorbing, others terrifying.
Here, then, is a selection of six real-world conspiracy theories and the varied movies they inspired – and funnily enough, Stanley Kubrick even pops up in one of the more familiar entries…
The conspiracy: The story goes that, during the chaos of World War II, a group of scientists working for the US navy were carrying out an experiment that could have altered the face of the battle completely: they were attempting to make a warship invisible. The warship in question was the USS Eldridge, docked in the Philadelphia Naval Yard, and the experiment supposedly took place in October 1943.
A scientist named Dr Franklin Reno was said to be the mind behind the project, having taken inspiration from Einstein's unified field theory – and according to the legend, it was a success. Not only was the ship rendered invisible, but in subsequent experiments, apparently teleported to another location 200 miles away and back again.
The experiment wasn't without its side-effects, however; sailors were said to have suffered from a range of ailments, including nausea, mental trauma, invisibility and spontaneous combustion. It's even said that some sailors were found partly embedded in the structure of the ship itself.
For its part, the US navy has always denied that the Philadelphia experiment ever took place, but this has merely added to the claims that the incident was covered up. Despite repeated counter-claims that the experiment is a mixture of hoax and misheard information (the navy really were looking at ways of making ships undetectable to magnetic torpedoes at the time, which could have somehow been misinterpreted as 'invisible'), the legend's endured, partly thanks to books like The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility.
The obvious question, though, is if the US navy managed to make a ship invisibile so long ago, why hasn't this technology become widespread since? The supporters of the conspiracy would probably argue that the US navy uses invisibility all the time – we just can't see the evidence.
The movies: "The experiment that should never have happened 41 years ago is still going on," read the tagline to The Philadelphia Experiment, which took the legend and turned it into a time-travel adventure-romance. Michael Pare and Bobby Di Cicco play two sailors aboard the USS Eldridge who find themselves thrown 40 years into the future by the experiment, and then have to figure out a means of closing off a rift in time and space that could destroy the entire planet.
Although not a big hit at the time of release, The Philadelphia Experiment is almost as persistent as the legend behind it: a belated sequel materialised in 1993, while a made-for-TV remake appeared on the Syfy Channel in 2012. The Philadelphia Experiment is also a good example of how urban legends perpetuate themselves through storytelling.
In the late 1980s, a chap named Al Bielek happened to catch a showing of the 1984 Philadelphia Experiment movie on television, which he claimed dislodged repressed memories of his own involvement in the 1943 project. In later interviews, he not only stated that he'd been a sailor aboard the USS Eldritch, but also that he'd been sent forward in time to the year 1983. Mind you, Bielek also claimed to have taken a time tunnel to Mars, conversed with aliens, travelled forward in time to the year 2137, and back to the year 100,000 BC. Bielek's claims then appeared to inspire the makers of the film 100,000 BC, a straight-to-video action film where members of the Philadelphia Experiment go back to the time of the dinosaurs.
Like a feedback loop, legends grow and change as they're told and retold.
The conspiracy: On the 8th July 1947, the Roswell Daily Record ran a front page story which read, "RAAF captures flying saucer on ranch in Roswell region". The US military later retracted their initial statement, saying instead that the debris they'd collected was from a crashed weather balloon rather than a unidentified flying object, but it was too late – one of the most discussed and famous conspiracy theories was born.
Accusations that the American government had recovered a flying saucer – or at least parts of one – grew in the years that followed, and stories began to circulate that living occupants of the craft had been taken to Area 51 (a now infamous military base) in New Mexico. By the 1990s, a range of books, eye-witness accounts, TV documentaries and even purported footage of alien autopsies had all materialised, all appearing to lend weight to the theory that the US government was hiding knowledge of flying saucers and visitors from outer space.
The movies: Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) remains one of the most lavish and well-made films to deal with the UFO phenomenon, taking in sightings of lights in the sky, abduction by aliens, and also the topic of a conspiracy on the part of the US government. Close Encounters' conclusion even suggests that America's scientists have engaged in some kind of foreign exchange program with visiting aliens, as Richard Dreyfuss' blue-collar hero clambers into a cathedral-like ship for a ride into the unknown.
The 1986 adventure film Flight Of The Navigator may also have taken a hint of inspiration from the Roswell incident and other stories like it, as a young boy takes a ride in a crashed, metallic UFO secretly held by NASA. Vaguely echoing what theorists argue happened in 1943, Flight Of The Navigator's scientists had whisked the ship from public view and attempted to cover up the craft's true nature by describing it to the police as an experimental space laboratory.
Interest in the Roswell incident began to rise again in the 1990s, possibly due to the publication of several books which brought forth new claims of downed saucers and conspiracies. One of these would become Roswell, a 1994 TV movie starring Kyle MacLachlan as a US major attempting to uncover the hidden truth about the crash. The quest for uncovering buried truths also provided the basis for The X-Files, Chris Carter's TV series that received a movie spin-off (itself about aliens and government cover-ups) in 1998.
Roland Emmerich's Independence Day (1996) made explicit use of Roswell lore; amid the destruction of an alien invasion, it's eventually revealed to Bill Pullman's President Whitmore that the military really had captured an alien space craft and three occupants in 1947, and that they'd been stored and studied for the past 49 years at Area 51. The repaired space craft then came in handy for the third act, where it was used to plant a computer virus in the invaders' mother ship – a plot point that's still derided by some movie geeks 18 years later.
About 12 months before Independence Day came out, a piece of black-and-white footage purportedly shot at Area 51 first appeared on television. Appearing to depict the autopsy of a humanoid creature, the 17-minute film caused an immediate fuss in the media, despite widespread suspicions that it was a hoax.
The chap who first brought the film to the public's attention, a British entrepreneur named Ray Santilli, later admitted that the footage had been faked, but insisted that it was based on some real film he'd seen a few years earlier – when the film degraded past the point where it was watchable, Santilli said he'd funded a reconstruction of what he'd previously witnessed. The whole curious incident became the basis of the 2006 comedy Alien Autopsy, starring British TV entertainment duo Ant and Dec.
If you want an example of how one single event can inspire a range of stories, look no further than the Roswell incident.
By FlameHorse via Listverse
Probably the best known mystery surrounding Kennedy's death is his missing brain. Not as well known are the mysterious deaths of many people connected to the assassination, eventually prompting the House Select Committee on Assassinations to look into possible foul play. After a cursory investigation, it found none.
Of course, a mysterious death may or may not involve foul play. Here are accounts of 10 people who witnessed Kennedy's actual assassination, or had pertinent knowledge of one or more people involved, and who died "untimely"—at least in some estimations.
We begin with Ruby, the only very famous entry, who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV just two days after Oswald had been arrested for killing Kennedy. When Kennedy was shot, Ruby was five blocks away from the Texas School Book Depository, distributing ads. He originally claimed to have shot Oswald in order to "redeem" Dallas and spare Jackie Kennedy the agony of a trial. But these motives—and everything else in Ruby's life—remain shrouded in contradictions.
Ruby himself later claimed that his first attorney had told him to testify to the above motives, while Vegas mobster Johnny Roselli claimed Ruby had been assigned to silence Oswald. In 1965, well after his conviction, Ruby had this to say about the murder: "Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives. The people who had so much to gain, and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I'm in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world."
On 3 January, 1967, Ruby died of a pulmonary embolism, a complication of lung cancer. Before his death, he had gone on record claiming that he had been visited by a man who injected him with what he was told were antibiotics for a chronic cold, but which he believed were really cancer cells. He had just been granted a new trial on the grounds that his first trial in Dallas could not have been fairly heard. Shortly before he passed away, Ruby told a psychiatrist that the assassination was a coup d'etat and that he knew who was responsible for Kennedy's murder.
Worrell was one of the very best eyewitnesses to Kennedy's assassination, providing unusually detailed answers to the usual questions about that day (his entire testimony before Congress is available here). In 1963, Worrell was a 20-year-old high school student living in Dallas with his mother and sister. When Kennedy arrived, Worrell decided to skip school in order to see the President, leaving home early in the morning and hitchhiking to Love Field. Finding he was too late to get a good view there, he left for Dealey Plaza and waited four or five feet in front of the Book Depository, on the sidewalk at the corner of Elm and Houston.
He watched as the motorcade came down Houston Street, and turned past him onto Elm. Then Worrell testified that he heard "four shots." He looked up after the first, which he realized was too loud to be a firecracker, and saw a rifle barrel protruding from the 5th or 6th-floor corner window of the building. He looked back to Kennedy's vehicle, heard the second shot, and saw the President slump over. He looked back up and saw the third shot's muzzle flash, then began running in a panic around the Depository and onto Houston Street, where he heard a fourth shot. Stopping to catch his breath, he turned in time to see a man run from the rear exit of the Depository and later gave a basic description of Oswald's height, build, and dress.
Three years later, on 6 November, 1966, Worrell was riding his motorcycle along Gus Thomasson Street in Dallas, along with a passenger named Lee Hudgins, when he apparently lost control of the vehicle, jumped the median curb, and overturned in the opposite lane. Worrell's head, without a helmet, struck the curb, and Hudgins was flung in front of a car. Both died at the hospital.
Boggs was perhaps the most high profile person connected to the assassination to die under mysterious circumstances. A longtime Louisiana Congressman, he was House Majority Whip when Kennedy was killed and became House Majority Leader in 1971. In 1963, he was appointed to the President's Commission on the Assassination, nicknamed the Warren Commission after its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren. The Commission ultimately concluded that Oswald acted alone, but three of its members disagreed—Boggs and Senators Richard Russell and Sherman Cooper. Russell, who died of natural causes in 1971, publicly stated his "lingering dissatisfaction" with the investigation, while Boggs accused FBI director J. Edgar Hoover of "lying his eyes out" during the hearings.
Boggs was a strong critic of the single bullet theory. According to this theory, Oswald fired three shots, the second of which struck Kennedy in the upper back, passed through his throat and continued into Texas Governor John Connally's back. The bullet then exited Connally's chest, smashed through his wrist, and stopped in his left thigh, creating a total of seven wounds in two people. Some critics have claimed this would have required the bullet to somehow rise in mid-flight between the two men, but Connally had actually been sitting in a specially added "jump seat" few inches lower than Kennedy, which would have made it possible for the bullet to cause the seven wounds.
The fact of Connally's seat height was not known at the time, but Boggs also strongly opposed the theory that Oswald acted alone, and that Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald. As House Majority Whip, then Leader, his words carried great weight.
On 16 October, 1972, Boggs was flying from Anchorage to Juneau with Alaskan Congressman Nick Begich and two others. They never arrived. The cause of the crash has never been discovered, nor has the wreckage of the plane, nor the bodies of the dead. Many civil aircraft of the time did not have emergency transmitters that would broadcast their locations upon crashing (such transmitters were made mandatory as a direct result of the incident). The four men were declared dead early the next year.